Looking from Canada to the United States, across Niagara's Horseshoe Falls

Monday, April 28, 2008

Jim "Crackpot" Bradley's Liberal realism

In Nov. 2007, CIHI released a study which showed that the mortality-rate in the Niagara Health System’s St. Catharines hospital was the third-highest in Canada.

Five months have passed, yet the local Liberal MPP, Jim Bradley, has not bothered to provide an explanation for this shocking revelation, right in Niagara, right in his backyard.

Neither has Bradley asked for any independent inquiry to provide an explanation for such poor results occurring in Bradley’s Liberal healthcare monopoly. Why hasn’t he? What is Bradley hiding? (...and why isn't the local press hounding Ole Jimmy for an answer? Why is the Niagara press looking the other way, and letting Bradley get away with hiding from this issue?!)

Niagara Falls Liberal MPP Kim Craitor, to deflect the impact of the CIHI report, raised a red-herring that the “governance” model of the NHS should be revisited, and that there should be more regional hospitals. (The question then is: how can the Liberal health monopoly, which can barely keep up with what it has now, support more hospitals?)

The Liberals announced, then re-announced, that they were going to review the governance model, and then the NHS said that they would have to first dig up a bunch of previously-carried-out-and-then-filed-in-the-basement reviews, and then review the reviews... and so we see the institutional circling of the wagons.

The fact is, Jim Bradley, the local MPP, has done nothing to explain why the health care system in his city of St. Catharines was/is performing with such poor results.

Does Bradley agree with Craitor that “governance” is the issue for this poor performance?

Or is it their Liberal government which is at fault for such poor performance?

Jane Coutts wrote in the Globe and Mail, (Oct.28, 1998) about the Niagara Health Services Restructuring Commission recommendations at the time:

“Local Liberal MPP Jim Bradley quickly denounced the proposals, saying the area has residents who are older, on average, than elsewhere in the province and will need more, not fewer, hospital beds.

"I know the crackpot realists will be accepting this . . . but I find it unacceptable. No one objects to rationalization of services, no one objects to elimination of duplication, or to single governance, . . . but with the demographics we have we should be maintaining our hospitals, not shutting them."”
Impressive Bradley-baffle-gab, isn't it?!
But what did Bradley really mean then?
In the 2007 election Bradley was trumpeting how he’s the champion of the planned new St. Catharines super hospital - an idea which in 1998 he found to be “unacceptable”!

But now, Liberal MPP Jim Bradley endorses an idea that he himself once said would be accepted by “crackpot realists”!! Pardon?!??

“No one objects to rationalization of services, no one objects to elimination of duplication, or to single governance,” said Bradley in 1998!

So, has Bradley bothered to repeat that duplicitous meme today, in 2008, when Craitor is trotting out “governance” to mask the troubles in Niagara’s Liberal government-run health-care monopoly?

What “single governance” was Bradley referring to, anyhow – the Board of a single hospital? A single region? A single network (...such as the LHIN bureaucracy, which the Liberals went on to spawn?) A single super-hospital? The authoritarian powers of a single health minister, ruling a single-payer, no-patient-choice failing health-care monopoly?

Bradley trumpeted in 1998 that Niagara will need more, not fewer, hospital beds.

But in 2006, Bradley’s Liberals were singing a different tune, as James Wallace reported in “More hospital beds not in the cards: premier” (St. Catharines Standard, Sept.30, 2006):

"Premier Dalton McGuinty has poured cold water on a call by Ontario doctors to create more hospital beds to ease emergency room overcrowding.McGuinty, in an exclusive interview with Osprey News yesterday, said emergency room doctors "got our attention," but deflected questions about funding additional beds to alleviate wait times."

Looks like McGuinty poured cold water on Jim Bradley, too.

The NHS has an unexplained high-mortality rate; the NHS has asked for more funding; yet, the NHS has been ordered by Liberal Health Minister George Smitherman (sickeningly being touted now as a potential mayor of Toronto?! WTF...? What's next... Bradley running for mayor of St. Catharines?) to 'live within its means'.

Bradley, who ten years ago huffed and puffed sanctimoniously aboutmore (not fewer) hospital beds, now stays silent when his own beloved Liberal premier saysno to more beds, as patients pile up on stretchers waiting in ER's!